Flexible wage slaves

These days it’s not unusual for someone on the way to work to receive a text message from her employer saying she’s not needed right then.

Although she’s already found someone to pick up her kid from school and arranged for childcare, the work is no longer available and she won’t be paid for it.

Just-in-time scheduling like this is the latest new thing, designed to make retail outlets, restaurants, hotels, and other customer-driven businesses more nimble and keep costs to a minimum.

Software can now predict up-to-the-minute staffing needs on the basis of  information such as traffic patterns, weather, and sales merely hours or possibly minutes before.

This way, employers don’t need to pay anyone to be at work unless they’re really needed. Companies can avoid paying wages to workers who’d otherwise just sit around.

Employers assign workers tentative shifts, and then notify them a half-hour or ten minutes before the shift is scheduled to begin whether they’re actually needed. Some even require workers to check in by phone, email, or text shortly before the shift starts.

Just-in-time scheduling is another part of the new “flexible” economy – along with the move to independent contractors and the growing reliance on “share economy” businesses, like Uber, that purport to do nothing more than connect customers with people willing to serve them.

New software is behind all of this – digital platforms enabling businesses to match their costs exactly with their needs. 

The business media considers such flexibility an unalloyed virtue. Wall Street rewards it with higher share prices. America’s “flexible labor market” is the envy of business leaders and policy makers the world over.

There’s only one problem. The new flexibility doesn’t allow working people to live their lives.

Businesses used to consider employees fixed costs  – like the costs of factories, offices, and equipment. Payrolls might grow or shrink over time as businesses expanded or contracted, but from year to year they were fairly constant.

That meant steady jobs. And with steady jobs came steady paychecks along with regular and predictable work schedules.

But employees are now becoming variable costs of doing business – depending on ups and downs in demand that may change hour by hour, possibly minute by minute.

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Yet working people have to pay the rent or make mortgage payments, and have keep up with utility, food, and fuel bills. These bills don’t vary much from month to month. They’re the fixed costs of living. 

Workers can’t simultaneously be variable costs for business yet live in their own fixed-cost worlds.

They’re also husbands and wives and partners, most are parents, and they often have to take care of elderly relatives. All this requires coordinating schedules in advance – who’s going to cover for whom, and when.

But such planning is impossible when you don’t know when you’ll be needed at work.

Whatever it’s called – just-in-time scheduling, on-call staffing, on-demand work, independent contracting, or the “share economy”  [in the uk it is more commonly known as Zero Hour Contracts]– the result is the same: No predictability, no economic security.

This makes businesses more efficient, but it’s a nightmare for working families.

Last week, the National Employment Law Project reported that 42 percent of U.S. workers make less than $15 an hour.

But even $20 an hour isn’t enough if the work is unpredictable and insecure.

Not only is a higher minimum wage critical. So are more regular and predictable hours.

Some states require employers to pay any staff who report to work for a scheduled shift but who are then sent home, at least 4 hours pay at the minimum wage.

But these laws haven’t kept up with software that enables employers to do just-in-time scheduling – and inform workers minutes before their shift that they’re not needed.

In what may become a test case, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman last week warned 13 big retailers – including Target and The Gap – that their just-in-time scheduling may violate New York law, which requires payments to workers who arrive for a shift and then are sent home.

We need a federal law requiring employers to pay for scheduled work.

Alternatively, if American workers can’t get more regular and predictable hours, they at least need stronger safety nets.

These would include high-quality pre-school and after-school programs; unemployment insurance for people who can only get part-time work; and a minimum guaranteed basic income. 

All the blather about “family-friendly workplaces” is meaningless if workers have no control over when they’re working.

By Robert B. Reich on Alternet website

We are wage slaves and that's the cold reality. Until we abolish wages system, as Marx and the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the IWW and Eugene Debs proposed, employers will use all manner of ways to ensure they extract the maximum profit from our toil

Agency wage slavery

“ Martin” works at the Jacob’s biscuit factory in Liverpool, although he’s not employed by the firm. Instead, he works for Prime Time Recruitment, one of Britain’s biggest suppliers of contract labour. He does the same work as Jacob’s own staff, and often substitutes for their absences – but is on the minimum wage; they get paid over £2 an hour more. They’re on a rota, while he has to wait by his phone for each shift. His holiday and sick-pay entitlements are much worse, too. Jacob’s staff enjoy access to a workplace gym and medical centre; when Martin had an accident with a forklift truck, the medical centre turned him away, telling him to find his own doctor.

Martin never knows when he will be working: just last week, he was rung up in the morning to be told he had 45 minutes to his next shift. Nor does he know where he will be working: his agency regularly offers him work in a factory in Blackpool. As Prime Time pointed out, that’s within a contractual 25-mile radius as the crow flies. But as Martin demonstrates on Google Maps, it’s over 50 miles by road, and the travel costs mean that a six-hour shift would only earn him just over £3 an hour. When he turns down such impossible jobs, the agency then uses a legal loophole to chalk him up as unavailable for work and pays him nothing.

Prime Time, has more control over his life than he does. What makes this different from zero-hours work is Martin isn’t directly employed by his workplace. But the effect is almost the same: the workers and their families are burdened with all the insecurity and powerlessness, while their employers enjoy the flexibility of labour on tap. Add the estimated 1.2 million agency workers to the 600,000 on zero-hours contracts, and you have a shadow workforce of about 1.8 million unpeople, enjoying none of the security that should come with employment in a rich country. Thanks to official neglect, so much about these unpeople is unknown. We don’t even know how many employment agencies there are, let alone how many names they have on their books. But we can say some things about such workers. They are never going to be helped by prime ministerial exhortations for a pay rise. As such, they form part of the answer to one of the major conundrums in Britain: what’s gone wrong in our labour market. he shadow workforce tells us that all this is bunk. Its growth points the way to a new world in which big employers draw upon a pool of casual labour, stripped of most of their rights and bargaining power. It’s a pool that’s been growing fast since the banking crisis. Particularly heavy users of agency workers are logistics companies of the kind that deliver our online Christmas orders, and food manufacturers such as Jacob’s, which disclosed last year that at any one time up to 250 of the 900 staff at its Aintree factory could be agency. (Today the firm estimated the agency number at 70.) Last year, the company marked its centenary of operations in Liverpool. Generations of locals would have passed through there, and the royal seal still hangs over the door. But those social ties now count for nothing; the factory is becoming a hub in an extractive labour market.

The shadow workforce is spreading especially fast in those economies that never recovered from Thatcher’s great industrial wipeout. Much of the former steel town of Corby is now just agency land. And in Martin’s home of Liverpool, the city council found that of the 13,771 vacancies advertised in Merseyside, nearly half – 6,600 – were for temporary agency work. Its report, published last autumn, in effect punctures all the smug forecasts that the jobs market will soon turn a corner. What it tells you is that for people like Martin, in hollowed-out economies like his suburb of Liverpool, the market isn’t suddenly going to right itself. And until that happens – as Barry Kushner, a Labour councillor, points out – the housing association will continue to rack up arrears, and the waiting list for advice at the local Citizens Advice bureau will grow.

As a middle-aged father, he’s borrowed to cover food and fuel bills, and “I’ve not known when I’ll be able to pay anything back”. Holidays? Forget it. He points at one of two toddlers messing around on the living-room floor: her first Christmas was “nearly ruined” for lack of money. What you need to know about agency workers, he says, is, “they don’t live, they get by”.

Sure, there are supply teachers enjoying the freedom that agency status brings. And one imagines that others do skip from temp job to fully fledged career. But elsewhere there are people like Martin, who have no choice. He’s holding out for a permanent staff position, yet can’t think of anyone who has made the leap. Nor can he sign on while looking for other work, because that would count as making himself voluntarily unemployed and lead to being deprived of jobseeker’s allowance. So he is stuck at the very bottom of the pile.

There are winners. The workfare company A4e, which sent Martin to the factory, gets a fee from the taxpayer for placing a warm body in a job. Jacob’s, an arm of a £2bn business, gets cheap labour with none of the pesky overheads or obligations. Middleman Prime Time, part of a group with a £500m annual turnover, takes its cut and was until last August getting government funding on top. The losers are Martin.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/19/jobs-agency-workers-britain-economy-insecure-low-paid-work

Wage Slavery

Workers sell their labour power to capitalist enterprises for a wage as stated above in earlier post . As a commodity, labour power has an exchange value and a use value, like all other commodities. Its exchange value is equal to the sum total of the exchange values of all those commodities necessary to produce and reproduce the labour power of the worker and his or her family. The use value of labour power is its value creating capacity which capitalist enterprises buy and put to work as labour. However, labour power is unlike other commodities in that it creates value. During a given period it can produce more than is needed to maintain the worker during the same period. The surplus value produced is the difference between the exchange value of labour power and the use value of the labour extracted by the capitalists. In capitalism, however,the wage-worker is a “free” agent. No master holds him as a chattel, nor feudal lord as serf. This modern worker is free and independent: he has choices. He can dispose of his services to this or that capitalist owner, or he can withhold them. But this freedom is ephemeral. He must sell his working ability to some one or other employer or face starvation. In a capitalist society workers have the option of finding a job or facing abject poverty and/or starvation. Little wonder, then, that people “voluntarily” sell their labour and “consent” to authoritarian structures! They have little option to do otherwise. So, within the labour market workers can and do seek out the best working conditions possible, but that does not mean that the final contract agreed is “freely” accepted and not due to the force of circumstances, that both parties have equal bargaining power when drawing up the contract or that the freedom of both parties is ensured. His slavery is cloaked under the guise of wage-labour.

When the worker has found an employer he receives in return for his labour a price known as wages which represents on the average what is necessary for his sustenance so that he can reproduce the energy to go on working, and also produce progeny to replace him when his working days are over. During the working-day the worker produces wealth equivalent to that for which he is paid wages, but this does not require all the time of the working day. In providing for his own keep he has also produced a surplus and this surplus belongs to the employer. This may eventually be split into profit to the manufacturer, rent to the landlord, and interest on capital invested by a financier. As capitalism develops the time in which the worker produces his own keep decreases while the surplus accruing to the capitalist increases. During this development the productivity of labor increases at an accelerating tempo: The worker continually produces more with less.

So when a man sells his labour power a number of hours for a certain wage, the amount of necessaries to produce his wages is always smaller than the amount of labour which the employer receives from him, the difference between what the worker receives as wages and what his labour power produces during his working time, constitutes the sole source of unearned income, i.e., capitalist profits. So profits exist because the worker sells themselves to the capitalist, who then owns their activity and, therefore, tries to control them like a machine.

Wage levels will vary with “the respective power of the combatants” as Marx puts it and in the long run this will determine the value of labour-power and the necessaries of life. From the point of view of wage-labour , wage levels and the value of labour-power depends on the balance of class forces, on what workers can actually get from their employers. As wages are also regulated by the relation of supply and demand, a surplus of labour power (the unemployed) is necessary to prevent wages swallowing up all profit. Therefore the unemployed army is a vital necessity to capitalist production, and there can be no solution under capitalism.

It would be wrong to confuse exploitation with low wages. It does not matter if real wages do go up or not. The absolute level of those wages is irrelevant to the creation and appropriation of value and surplus-value. Labour is exploited because labour produces the whole of the value created in any process of production but gets only part of it back. On average workers sell their labour-power at a “fair” market price and still exploitation occurs. As sellers of a commodity (labour-power) they do not receive its full worth i.e. what they actually produce. Nor do they have a say in how the surplus value produced by their labour gets used.

Capitalism is a market economy, but not a simple market economy. A key difference of course is that under capitalism production is not carried out by self-employed producers but wage and salary workers employed by business enterprises. In other words, by profits we mean income that flows to the owner of a workplace or land who hires others to do the work. In other words, under capitalism, the producers have become separated from the means of production. This makes all the difference.
Marx explained the difference when he said that what happens in a simple market economy is that the producers brought to market a product of a certain value which they sell for money in order to buy another product or products of equal value. The economic circuit is commodity-money-commodity (C-M-C), the aim being to end up with a basket of useful things. Under capitalism the economic circuit is different. A capitalist sets out with a sum of money which they use to buy commodities (factory buildings, raw materials, working skills) that can be used to produce other commodities with the aim of ending up, after these other commodities have been sold, with more money than they started off with. So the circuit is now money-commodities-more money (M-C-M+).

But the picture of capitalism is still not complete.

Capitalist investors want to end up with more money than they started out with, but why? Is it just to live in luxury and consume? It is possible to envisage such an economy on paper. Marx did, and called it “simple reproduction”, but only as a stage in the development of his argument. By “simple reproduction” he meant that the stock of means of production was simply reproduced from year to year at its previously existing level; all of the profits (all of M+ less M) would be used to maintain a privileged, exploiting class in luxury . As a result the M in M-C-M+ would always remain the same and the circuit keep on repeating itself unchanged. This of course is not how capitalism operates. Profits are capitalised, i.e. reinvested in production, so that production, the stock of means of production, and the amount of capital, all tend to increase over time . The economic circuit is thus money-commodities-more money-more commodities, even more money (M-C-M+-C+-M++). In order to make more money, money must be transformed into capital.

This is not the conscious choice of the capitalists. It is something that is imposed on them as a condition for not losing their original investment. Competition with other capitalists forces them to reinvest as much of their profits as they can afford to in keeping their means and methods of production up to date. They cannot act contrary to the inner nature of capitalism which requires the constant accumulation of capital and the opening of new markets throughout the world. And it cannot avoid that increasing productivity of labor which means more production for less expenditure of labour.

The worker goes into the labour market as an article of merchandise, and his wages, that is, his price, is determined like that of any other article of merchandise, by the cost of production (i.e. the social labour necessary), and this in the case of the worker is represented by the cost of subsistence. The price of labour power fluctuates by the operation of supply and demand. There are generally more workers in the market than are actually required by the employers, and this fact serves to keep wages from rising for any length of time above the cost of subsistence. Moreover, machinery and scientific applications are ever tending to render labourers superfluous, with a consequent overstocking of the labour market, decrease of wages, and an increase in the number of the unemployed. Under these conditions reelative poverty is necessarily the lot of the working-class.

We have the worker entirely dispossessed of the means of getting a living except by selling himself as an article of merchandise to the owners of the means of living. This is wage-slavery. While capitalists are as a class against the workers as regards the ownership of the wealth produced by the working-class, they, the capitalists, are also antagonistic to one another in the endeavour to get the larger share of the markets. It wasn’t just Marx but also Fourier who pointed long ago that this competition could only end in monopoly, and we do see concentration going on in every branch of industry.

The REAL Illegal Immigration problem

The front page story of the Independent is featuring three Florida fruit-pickers, held captive and brutalised by their employer for more than a year, finally broke free of their bonds by punching their way through the ventilator hatch of the van in which they were imprisoned. Once outside, they dashed for freedom. When they found sanctuary one recent Sunday morning, all bore the marks of heavy beatings to the head and body. One of the pickers had a nasty, untreated knife wound on his arm. Police would learn later that another man had his hands chained behind his back every night to prevent him escaping, leaving his wrists swollen. The migrants were not only forced to work in sub-human conditions but mistreated and forced into debt. They were locked up at night and had to pay for sub-standard food. If they took a shower with a garden hose or bucket, it cost them $5.

A week after the escapees managed to emerge from the van in which they had been locked up for the night, police discovered that a forced labour operation was supplying fruit-pickers to local growers. Court papers describe how migrant workers were forced into debt and beaten into going to work on farms in Florida, as well as in North and South Carolina. Detectives found another 11 men who were being kept against their will in the grounds of a Florida house .The men had to pay to live in the back of vans and for food. Their entire pay cheques went to the Navarettes and they were still in debt. They slept in decrepit sheds and vehicles in a yard littered with rubbish. When one man did not want to go to work because he was sick, he was allegedly pushed and kicked .
The complaint reveals that the men were forced to pay rent of $20 (£10) a week to sleep in a locked furniture van where they had no option but to urinate and defecate in a corner. They had to pay $50 a week for meals – mostly rice and beans with meat perhaps twice a week if they were lucky. The fruit-pickers' caravans, which they share with up to 15 other men, rent for $2,400 a month – more per square foot than a New York apartment .

Their story of slavery and abuse in the fruit fields of sub-tropical Florida threatens to lift the lid on some appalling human rights abuses in America today.

Between December and May, Florida produces virtually the entire US crop of field-grown fresh tomatoes. Fruit picked here in the winter months ends up on the shelves of supermarkets and is also served in the country's top restaurants and in tens of thousands of fast-food outlets. But conditions in the state's fruit-picking industry range from straightforward exploitation to forced labour. Tens of thousands of men, women and children – excluded from the protection of America's employment laws and banned from unionising – work their fingers to the bone for rates of pay which have hardly budged in 30 years.

Fruit-pickers, who typically earn about $200 (£100) a week, are part of an unregulated system designed to keep food prices low and the plates of America's overweight families piled high. The migrants, largely Hispanic and with many of them from Mexico, are the last wretched link in a long chain of exploitation and abuse. They are paid 45 cents (22p) for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes collected. A worker has to pick nearly two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes – a near impossibility – in order to reach minimum wage. So bad are their working and living conditions that the US Department of Labour, which is not known for its sympathy to the underdog, has called it "a labour force in considerable distress". Florida has a long history of exploiting migrant workers. Farm labourers have no protection under US law and can be fired at will.

A campaign has been under way to improve the workers' conditions. After years of talks, a scheme to pay the tomato pickers a penny extra per pound has been signed off by McDonald's, the world's biggest restaurant chain, and by Yum!, which owns 35,000 restaurants including KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. But Burger King, which also buys its tomatoes in Immokalee, has so far refused to participate, threatening the entire scheme.

Burger King will not pay the extra penny a pound that the tomato-pickers are demanding he said. "If we agreed to the penny per pound, Burger King would pay about $250,000 annually, or $100 per worker. How does that solve exploitation and poverty?" the vice-president of Burger King asked. Indeed it would not but improved wages could ameliorate their condition a little .

Whole Foods Market, which recently expanded into Britain with a store in London's upmarket suburb of Kensington, has been discovered stocking tomatoes from one of the most notorious Florida sweatshop producers. Whole Foods ignored an appeal by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to pay an extra penny a pound for its tomatoes. So much for their much vaunted claim to be "committed to supporting and promoting economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable agriculture" and supporting "the right of all workers to be treated fairly and humanely."

Little has changed since 1960 when the journalist Edward R Murrow shocked Americans with Harvest Of Shame, a television broadcast about the bleak and underpaid lives of the workers who put food on their tables and famously stated

"We used to own our slaves but now we just rent them,"

The Walk of Shame

Not so long ago , there was the Walk of Witness by leading churchmen to mark the abolition of slavery and apologise for their predecessors involvement in the slave trade .

William Wilberforce is receiving much acclaim for his part in the campaign to end slavery but as this blog points out Wilberforce himself did not mind men and women being chained to wage slavery by the capitalist class .

Migrant Workers - Labour turns the screw once more

Migrant workers who come to Britain as cooks, cleaners and nannies could become virtual slaves in their employers' homes under new immigration rules, campaigners are warning. Ministers faced charges of hypocrisy as Labour campaigned on the issue in opposition, highlighting accusations of sexual abuse, physical assault and poverty pay regularly faced by foreign domestic staff.

17,000 non-European Union foreign nationals receive visas every year to work as domestic servants in Britain.
They are legally entitled to leave their employer if they are abused or exploited and to receive basic protection - including the minimum wage - under UK employment law.
That will be swept away by proposed changes to immigration rules, which will severely restrict domestic workers' rights.
In future domestic workers will only be allowed in on non-renewable business visas which will end their ability to get a new job if they are mistreated by their employer.

Kate Roberts, a community support worker , which counsels the victims of abusive employers, said she was horrified by the Government's change of heart. "These changes will remove the most basic protection for migrant domestic workers," she said. "They will be left incredibly vulnerable to exploitation or abuse."

Barbara Roche, a former immigration minister, said: " These new proposals are a very retrograde step. Workers who suffer abuse from employers will feel absolutely alone. "

Diana Holland, the T&G National Organiser for Women, Race and Equalities, said that until 1998 the visa system had turned "migrant domestic workers into slaves". She warned that Home Office policy reversal would strip them of their right to challenge and would once again mean abuse going unchecked.


This month's Socialist Standard carries an editorial on slavery